The
other harvest songs of Western Asia and Egypt, to which attention
has been called above, may now be dismissed much more briefly. The
similarity of the Bithynian Bormus to the Phrygian Lityerses helps
to bear out the interpretation which has been given of the latter.
Bormus, whose death or rather disappearance was annually mourned by
the reapers in a plaintive song, was, like Lityerses, a king's son
or at least the son of a wealthy and distinguished man. The reapers
whom he watched were at work on his own fields, and he disappeared
in going to fetch water for them; according to one version of the
story he was carried off by the nymphs, doubtless the nymphs of the
spring or pool or river whither he went to draw water. Viewed in the
light of the Lityerses story and of European folk-custom, this
disappearance of Bormus may be a reminiscence of the custom of
binding the farmer himself in a corn-sheaf and throwing him into the
water. The mournful strain which the reapers sang was probably a
lamentation over the death of the corn-spirit, slain either in the
cut corn or in the person of a human representative; and the call
which they addressed to him may have been a prayer that he might
return in fresh vigour next year.
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